Several countries, from precautionary principle basis, have banned it from baby bottles - mostly cosmetic being that it had been removed from baby bottles long ago.

It's a chemical, it has various properties. It's used in some #3 plastics and of course the nebulous #7 (other) plastics. It's simply not part of most food packaging plastics. There's been work indicating that dust ingestion may be a significant exposure route which would lead us to textile composition.

It can be ubiquitously detected everyplace, much like radioactive fallout from above ground nuke testing, lead from paint and leaded gasoline, and mercury from fluorescent light bulbs.

At levels far higher than typical background levels there are recognized effects and understanding of specific mechanisms of action.

The science tying it in with every conceivable human malady is suspect, non-repeatable correlations, small sample sizes, no plausible mechanism of action...

In part it looks like a recreational pastime for a subset of environmental activists who would prefer to excise plastics from human existence.

There are identified and largely mitigated risks and continued research where indicated is warranted, however wholesale shutdown of the plastics industry is not in the cards.

At present there are very few legitimate papers out there linking the levels of bisphenol A found in canned food to any harm at all. This is likely because the amounts are tiny and it is excreted quite rapidly.

There's a lot of mooing and honking coming from "but but but DETECTABLE LEVELS!" - Which is because we're really fucking good at detecting the stuff on the parts per billion scale.

I wouldn't worry until someone manages to show that these miniscule amounts are causally related to any malady. Which may never happen. Right now, treat it like you treated the whole monosodium glutamate hilarity or the whole labeling fad going on right now with labels which may as well be "RAT POISON FREE" and "100% NO RUSTY NAILS"

At present there are very few legitimate papers out there linking the levels of bisphenol A found in canned food to any harm at all. This is likely because the amounts are tiny and it is excreted quite rapidly.

There's a lot of mooing and honking coming from "but but but DETECTABLE LEVELS!" - Which is because we're really fucking good at detecting the stuff on the parts per billion scale.

I wouldn't worry until someone manages to show that these miniscule amounts are causally related to any malady. Which may never happen. Right now, treat it like you treated the whole monosodium glutamate hilarity or the whole labeling fad going on right now with labels which may as well be "RAT POISON FREE" and "100% NO RUSTY NAILS"

LOL...awesome.

Thanks and it is much as I thought - but it never hurts to get expert opinions.

Totally. This is probably the reason why many top quality food producers are going back to using glass containers as opposed to plastic.

The reason it's being phased out is hysteria by a small segment of the population that was magnified by the media.

I think that this is wrong. The reason that it's being phased out is that it's nearly impossible to determine what the safe level of BPA is. It's known that BPA acts like estrogen, and BPA has been used as an estrogen substitute. It's impossible to prevent BPA from leaching out of whatever it's used in, and the amounts don't seem to be that low compared to amounts that might have effects.

In most toxicology studies, it's very hard to determine what the effects of long-term, low-level exposure are. For hormone mimics, it's even harder, because hormones are tightly regulated and act on a limited number of cells at specific times. Hormone receptors can have extremely high affinities for hormones, as well, making it difficult to be confident about what constitutes a low level. There are many studies about low-level BPA exposure, and they reach different conclusions about BPA. I'd say that the reason BPA hasn't been banned is that it's hard to find a good substitute plasticizer.

Glass has some problems, too. First, the lids of glass containers are metal, and the metal is coated with BPA-containing plastic. So, the container has less BPA, but still has some. Second, glass doesn't protect the food as well as metal, because of photochemical damage. I learned this from the Eden Foods website, which I was reading after I posted my comment above. Eden Foods is a manufacturer of organic foods. The cost of their BPA-reduced and BPA-free packaging is pretty large. What I see is that packaging is 50% of their costs and that BPA-free costs 20% more than BPA-included, but I can't find absolute numbers. Third, glass is more expensive to ship, because it's heavier and bulkier.

The reason that it's being phased out is that it's nearly impossible to determine what the safe level of BPA is.

If we waited for long-term safety studies before using new materials, we wouldn't make anything. Not even medicines.

Well, we should probably wait, if the material is something that appears to be hazardous and is something where exposure is continued over an extended period. For a lot of medicines, exposure is for a relatively short time, and the benefits can be immediately assessed. For medicines that are taken for a lifetime, much more evidence about the effects over a lifetime is needed.

The reason that it's being phased out is that it's nearly impossible to determine what the safe level of BPA is.

If we waited for long-term safety studies before using new materials, we wouldn't make anything. Not even medicines.

Well, we should probably wait, if the material is something that appears to be hazardous and is something where exposure is continued over an extended period. For a lot of medicines, exposure is for a relatively short time, and the benefits can be immediately assessed. For medicines that are taken for a lifetime, much more evidence about the effects over a lifetime is needed.

precisely. Also, it's not like we banned some new material. We are banning old material because it is very biologically active (most materials aren't hormone equivalent), and leaches into food.

BPA is weakly estrogenic and rapidly metabolized to non-estrogenic compounds. Background levels in humans are around 1-2 parts per billion, the papers from the scientific literature I read were at levels 1,000 - 1,000,000 fold higher than those levels and in animals like tadpoles and mice.

Multigenerational rodent studies with a diet of 5% BPA noted reduced body weight and some expected liver anomalies from processing that much chemical, no increases in birth defects or cancers were noted.

While I haven't dug into it for this, companies like Eden Food that have a fiduciary interest in a BPA scare have on occasion been documented to use K-Street firms that specialize in engineering this type of slime campaign.

You want something to worry about? Plants and mushrooms are chemical factories pumping out all manner of toxins and anti-nutrients and we quite voluntarily consume them.

BPA is weakly estrogenic and rapidly metabolized to non-estrogenic compounds. Background levels in humans are around 1-2 parts per billion, the papers from the scientific literature I read were at levels 1,000 - 1,000,000 fold higher than those levels and in animals like tadpoles and mice.

Multigenerational rodent studies with a diet of 5% BPA noted reduced body weight and some expected liver anomalies from processing that much chemical, no increases in birth defects or cancers were noted.

If we are going full conspiracy with expectation that the studies were faked, we should also expect massive faking of various other safety studies in the other direction, especially as the studies which are purported to demonstrate safety are often directly funded by the patent holder.

It took me a while to make the connection, but I remember being out on a backpacking trip in 1997 or 1998, and running into a guy out at a campsite who ranted at us about our polycarbonate Nalgene water bottles (BPA-containing, in hindsight) having estrogen in them. I have no idea what the guy's background was; at the time we pretty much wrote him off as a crackpot. But I guess there was some research and information about this available even back then.

The study is in mice which have fecal versus urinary excretion of metabolites and the effects did not show up at the 2 ppb which is a bit above human mean background level, even at the 20 ppb the effects were less than doses of DES at 1/1000 of that level.

Full conspiracy is explaining why the government repeatedly allows continued use of the chemical in the face of this allegedly overwhelming evidence of hazard.

[...] the quantified amount of free bisphenol A present in biological samples may be affected by contamination with bisphenol A in plastic laboratory ware and in reagents. In addition, the accuracy may also be affected by measurement technique, particularly at the very low concentrations that can now be measured. ELISA have the potential to overestimate bisphenol A in biologic samples due to lack of specificity of the antibody and effects of the biologic matrix. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with ultraviolet, fluorescence, or electrochemical detection is unable to make definitive identification of bisphenol A or bisphenol A glucuronides, because similar retention times may occur for the metabolites of other endogenous and exogenous compounds. Use of LC-tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) with and without hydrolysis of bisphenol A glucuronide permits determination of free and total bisphenol A with a limit of quantification of 1 µg/L. Gas chromatography (GC)/ MS/MS has been used with solid phase extraction after treatment with glucuronidase and derivatization to measure total bisphenol A with a limit of detection of 0.1 µg/L. Bisphenol A glucuronidate has been shown to be unstable and can be hydrolyzed to free bisphenol A at neutral pH and room temperature in diluted urine of rats and in rat placental and fetal tissue homogenates at room temperature. Bisphenol A glucuronide can also be hydrolyzed and in some cases degraded to unknown components either in acidic or basic pH solutions of diluted urine, adding another potential source of error in the measurement of sample levels of bisphenol A and its conjugates. These considerations taken together, suggest that it is possible that free bisphenol A concentrations measured in biological samples may be overestimated.

BPA is weakly estrogenic and rapidly metabolized to non-estrogenic compounds. Background levels in humans are around 1-2 parts per billion, the papers from the scientific literature I read were at levels 1,000 - 1,000,000 fold higher than those levels and in animals like tadpoles and mice.

I don't claim any expertise, but Wikipedia's Pharmokinetics section is a lot more equivocal about this than you are:

Wikipedia wrote:

There is no agreement between scientists of a physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) BPA model for humans.

Hellburner wrote:

You want something to worry about? Plants and mushrooms are chemical factories pumping out all manner of toxins and anti-nutrients and we quite voluntarily consume them.

Yes, but millions of years of evolution will have ensured some sort of adaptation to these. For BPA, I don't know.

I'd want something a little more solid than 'ohh maybe it leached out of labware' argument you seem to be now making against your own 2 parts per billion figure after it became too high for comfort. I linked that study because googling for the low dose effects pops up immediately a study that gives factor of 10 difference rather than your 1000 or 1000 000 . Also, the lack of measured effect at 1/10 the dose would normally simply be a consequence that they would of needed to up the sample size by factor of 100 (if effect is roughly linear) to measure it with same confidence.

If you go against consensus (or in that case, against noted lack of consensus) you'd better have real good reasons for doing so.

I believe certain "artificial flavors" don't contain cyanide, while the natural versions actually do (though since humans do need a small amount, per my understanding, it's not a big deal). Still, amusing that the "artificial version" is actually more pure than the natural extract.

I believe certain "artificial flavors" don't contain cyanide, while the natural versions actually do (though since humans do need a small amount, per my understanding, it's not a big deal). Still, amusing that the "artificial version" is actually more pure than the natural extract.

Lots of things contain cyanide, including lima beans and almonds. Wild almonds are, in fact, toxic because of their cyanide. Another source of dietary cyanide is Vitamin B12, which is often present as cyanocobalamin. Virtually all vitamin supplements have cyanocobalamin because it's so stable. Cyanide is released in activating the vitamin.

Cyanide is toxic because it binds tightly to metals, but evolution has been dealing with this problem since the beginning of life, and small amounts don't appear to have any serious effects.

I'm not sure which artificial flavor you're describing. A typical example of this is vanilla. Real vanilla extract is a mixture of many compounds. Artificial vanilla is likely just vanillin, which is one component of vanilla extract. Vanillin can be made extremely pure, but it doesn't taste like real vanilla.

For what it's worth, a major newspaper here in Sweden recently let a bunch of reporters eat food from cans lined with BPA for two days. They then measured the difference of BPA in their bodys and found that the levels increased 3-5 times the normal. If I recall correctly they found that BPA is leaked a lot easier to fat foods such as canned coconut milk and the like.

I also remember the craze back in 2010 (?) when the news reported BPA in receipts. A burger chain here went out big with "non BPA receipts" as a marketing hype. I do believe that they found that it only was an issue if you handled a lot of receipts daily, such as cashiers etc.

There is still too little scientific facts to base anything on, but I for one stay the hell away from canned coconut milk and will not let a future baby get a plastic bottle to drink out of unless it's completely BPA free.

Glass has some problems, too. First, the lids of glass containers are metal, and the metal is coated with BPA-containing plastic. So, the container has less BPA, but still has some. Second, glass doesn't protect the food as well as metal, because of photochemical damage. I learned this from the Eden Foods website, which I was reading after I posted my comment above. Eden Foods is a manufacturer of organic foods. The cost of their BPA-reduced and BPA-free packaging is pretty large. What I see is that packaging is 50% of their costs and that BPA-free costs 20% more than BPA-included, but I can't find absolute numbers. Third, glass is more expensive to ship, because it's heavier and bulkier.

Good points. All the more reason to focus on eating fresh, non-preserved foods I suppose. One nice thing about glass is that it is more easily recyclable than plastic.

For what it's worth, a major newspaper here in Sweden recently let a bunch of reporters eat food from cans lined with BPA for two days. They then measured the difference of BPA in their bodys and found that the levels increased 3-5 times the normal. If I recall correctly they found that BPA is leaked a lot easier to fat foods such as canned coconut milk and the like.

I also remember the craze back in 2010 (?) when the news reported BPA in receipts. A burger chain here went out big with "non BPA receipts" as a marketing hype. I do believe that they found that it only was an issue if you handled a lot of receipts daily, such as cashiers etc.

There is still too little scientific facts to base anything on, but I for one stay the hell away from canned coconut milk and will not let a future baby get a plastic bottle to drink out of unless it's completely BPA free.

I've also seen reports that acidic foods such as tomatoes leech more BPA out in the cans.

Being that that's the most recent NIH review on BPA I saw, it's about as solid as you're going to get.

Then BPA must be banned, if the best that could be made is handwaving how the concentrations must of have been measured wrong. Let's look at sequence of events here: you post 2 parts per billion figure, claim effects are not observable at below 1000 to 1 000 000 times that, very quick googling immediately pops up a study finding effect at 20 parts per billion. Now the 2 parts per billion figure is too damn high, and one government wonderfully known for its unique stance in the world at embracing intelligent design and at denying global warming did even spit out arguments that it must of been leached out of labware (jesus christ what sort of plastics do they use for labware), and measured wrong somehow. edit: oh wait, i forgot that you're one of those american global warming denialists, and some handwave how the data you don't like must have been measured wrong is the staple. Gonna actually just put you on ignore. Also, I don't really give much shit about BPA. It's just rather annoying to see this shifty pattern of motivated cognition. Ohh, 2 parts per billion, that's so much smaller than the effective doses, ohh wait the effective doses are much smaller than I though, well, then the 2 parts per billion must have been always mis-measured somehow and consistently with people handling or not handling BPA paper etc etc etc etc.

Results: The association between the average of the two BPA measurements and maternal thyroid hormone levels was not statistically significant. Of the two BPA measurements, only the measurement taken closest in time to the TH measurement was significantly associated with a reduction in total T4 (β=-0.13 μg/dL per log2 unit; 95%CI=-0.25, 0.00). The average of the maternal BPA concentrations was associated with reduced TSH in boys (-9.9% per log2 unit; 95%CI=-15.9%, -3.5%) but not in girls. Among boys, the relation was stronger when BPA was measured in the third trimester of pregnancy and decreased with time between BPA and TH measurements.

So, if you squint and look at it just the right way there might be something worth studying. That something might not be anything harmful, but OMG! the sky is falling and we must banish BPA from the face of the Earth.

The same effects/thought processes can be seen/applied to the phytoestrogens that are bountiful in soybeans and many other food plants.

Then there's the poor innocent button mushroom, packed full of agaritine, an IARC Group 3 carcinogen...

Perspective. Everything has a risk level, you cannot make the world 100% safe.

Hmm so it looks like BPA is high in SOUP and really high in TUNA (which has mercury to begin with).

Frankly though, we know BPA is bad for us, so it just makes sense to avoid all canned foods if possible. Why be exposed if you don't have to right? Also, apparently Tetra pak products are BPA free, so that makes it a bit easier to avoid the stuff. I already buy tetrapak tomatoes so thats a win.

The current dietary exposure to BPA through food packaging is not expected to pose a health risk to the general population, including newborns and infants.

Then based on unanswered questions at the limits they further say:

Quote:

Health Canada's Food Directorate has recommended that precaution be exerted on products consumed by the sensitive subset of the population, i.e. infants and newborns, by applying the ALARA (as low as reasonably achievable) principle

So just to be safe let's get rid of the BPA low hanging fruit.

It's quite the mental gymnastics to come to "we know BPA is bad for us" based on such information.

Oh, and what is soy found in? Processed food. Junk food. Fast foods. Yet another thing to avoid. Frankly I think the Japanese figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to eat soy is fermented.

The fact that there's phytoestrogens in the soy is irrelevant to the effects of BPA, unless you're trying to make the point that we must have evolved to compensate for estrogen analogs and that would for some reason make the BPA safe as well.

I don't have particular opinion on BPA, it may well be a very minor issue, but I have very strong opinion on the practice of throwing incorrect numbers around to argue the point. Regardless of whenever BPA has effects or not, plenty of the arguments that it does not have effect are rather universal denialism with which you can deny pretty much anything. Motivated discarding of the data iff it goes against opinion is a very universal technique.

According to the links posted in this thread, the highest concentrations of BPA in canned food are over 50 times higher than the doses needed to cause reproductive changes in female rats. Worse, I apparently have some of those same soups at home

You need to read and understand the scientific literature to meaningfully discuss science, bombast doesn't substitute for knowledge.

Sarcasm and condescension are not a good way to respond to someone pointing out that you have said something untrue. It makes you seem like you've made up your mind without full understanding of the issue and are unwilling to reevaluate your position. A better way would be to explain why you were mistaken and then advance a corrected argument so I can determine how trustworthy your opinions are going forward.

According to the links posted in this thread, the highest concentrations of BPA in canned food are over 50 times higher than the doses needed to cause reproductive changes in female rats. Worse, I apparently have some of those same soups at home

I wish I hadn't clicked this thread. I like canned soup for lunch.

Well, in the fairness, it may not be great idea to base things on 1 study that I searched for just to counter some obvious BS, and the rats in question were embryos. On top of that the concentrations were the concentration in the rat, not in something rat ate. There may be some safety margin still, the issue is that the leaching is probably very variable etc.

The opinion of endocrine society, however, is a big thing. The opinion of FDA, well they banned it in baby bottles already and in all likelihood will ban it from canned soup after some short customary modernization of "how may it be that tobacco smoking causes cancer?" play. There's companies with no-BPA cans and technologies, so the commercial pressure is not so one sided.

BPA is often described as a very “weak” estrogen because in a few assay systems, such as MCF-7 breast cancer cells in culture, the dose of BPA required to stimulate cell proliferation (~ 10−7 M or 23 ppb) is roughly 100,000 times higher relative to estradiol, which stimulates cell proliferation at approximately 10−12 M (Welshons et al. 1999). This contrasts, however, with the stimulation by BPA of calcium influx in MCF-7 cells that was significant at the lowest dose tested, which was 10−10 M or 23 ppt (Walsh et al. 2005). BPA also stimulated calcium influx and prolactin secretion in rat pituitary tumor cells at the lowest dose tested (10−12 M or 0.23 ppt), and the magnitude of the response to BPA was similar to the response to the same dose of estradiol (Wozniak et al. 2005). It is difficult to conceive how a chemical that can alter cell function at concentrations < 1 ppt can be characterized as a “weak” endocrine disruptor.

Obviously, for a habitual denialist, while the cell assay systems where it was a weak estrogen were totally okay as justification, other assays would suddenly be not convincing because it is just in vitro etc etc.

I recommend reading whole of that article. One to one recreation of tobacco controversy, pretty much. Industry funded studies using every trick they could to avoid finding the result. They got lucky as apparently there's one fast growing strain of rat that is over 100x less sensitive to estrogens than human females:

Quote:

Yamasaki et al. (2002) reported that the CD-SD strain of rat showed some responses to 50-μg/kg/day ethinylestradiol administered for 28 days, and more responses to the very high dose of 200 μg/kg/day. Ethinylestradiol is the potent estrogenic drug used by women in birth control pills at a dose of 0.5 μg/kg/day (based on a body weight of 60 kg). The CD-SD rat thus has a very low sensitivity to ethinylestradiol, because relative to women, it requires 100- to 400-fold higher doses to produce effects. In contrast, the fetal male CF-1 mouse examined in the initial vom Saal laboratory studies with BPA responded to ethinylestradiol with significant changes in adult sperm production and prostate size at a maternal oral dose of 0.002 μg/kg/day (Thayer et al. 2001). The CF-1 male mouse fetus is thus between 25,000 and 100,000 times more sensitive to ethinylestradiol relative to the CD-SD rat. Yamasaki et al. (2002) also reported that 600 mg/kg/day BPA was required to see effects in CD-SD rats. This dose is > 200,000 times higher than the BPA doses used in studies conducted in the vom Saal laboratory (Howdeshell et al. 1999, Nagel et al. 1997), and as indicated above, it is also dramatically higher than doses of BPA required to cause effects in > 90 other low-dose BPA studies conducted with other types of rats, various mouse strains, and other experimental vertebrate and invertebrate animals. There are now many studies that have been conducted with rats other than the CD-SD strain that show low-dose effects of BPA, but very few of these studies were subject to review by the HCRA panel (Gray et al. 2004).